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How to test a programmers coding ability?

I am interviewing a lead programmer and I have already done the 'cultural fit' test and found they were a good match. Now I am trying to see what their coding ability is like, since they will be coding our whole site.

This person in particular is older and has been a part of a couple start ups. They do not have any public projects that we can view, but their track record indicates they know how to code.

Our company is a marketplace and I was thinking of having him create a craigslist crawler that could autopost items in craigslist for us. Does that seem like a fair test for their coding abilities?

Not in my opinion. That challenge seems pretty easy and doesn't test one
critical thing: writing flexible code.
I think it is good to test them by giving them a challenge, but telling
them that part of the challenge is that you will later change or add one of
the requirements. The change shouldn't be big. That way you can tell if he
makes brittle code that isn't flexible to changes in the real world or not.

Director at PetHero, SPC - Member at Eastside Incubator - Principal at Tuxedo Technologies Group

...that would be an interesting test of his/her personal/professional ethics since what you are asking them to do is, i believe, in violation of CL's terms of use. Of course they might also question your ethics for asking. As an FYI, there are likely CL crawler projects on GitHub and i know there are some Ruby gems that do what you are suggesting.

A techie doing a code and design review after that project is done and delivered would be a perfect follow-up. They can talk about design decision, coding practices, algorithms etc.

A techie doing a straight interview is a no-no. In this era of multiple platforms, languages, libraries, frameworks:

{set of techie 'interviewer' questions} and {set of potential founder knowledge required for success} is almost an empty set.

Sure you can ask basic fundamental CS questions of algorithms and data structures or threads or map-reduce or nosql or javascript or rails and test their knowledge. But, none of those are predictors of success.

For a startup, the best predictor is execution. Why not do a real world test of execution?

So, you are on the right path. Just follow it up with a design/code review with a techie.

My advice, I have a few scars from this sort of situation, get a veteran technical adviser and have them do a real time coding skills test especially if they have not other work or code on github you can review.

Also, make sure you have vesting shares with a cliff on the vesting so if it does not work out you do not find yourself with a shareholder that is not adding value.

Take a look at www.kitovet.com. This is a new service that hosts projects relevant to your business so job applicants can go through the exercise, then the company evaluates the results and provides you a scorecard.

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